


this earth, this realm

by greatunironic



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Thor (2011)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:24:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatunironic/pseuds/greatunironic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>james dreams of falling. (originally written for this prompt at norsekink. i think it's safe to say that this got totally out of hand.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

Mrs. Potter gives birth to a son in March of 1960. She is nearing fifty and she has thought for so long that she could never have a child, that she or Mr. Potter have been barren since their own births, but along comes this boy, this gift. He is beloved and cherished beyond all the gold in Gringotts, with his jet black, unruly hair and his eyes that seem to switch from brown to green in the light and a power that seems to radiate from him. He is called James.  
  
*  
  
James has his first dream of falling when he is five. He wakes up screaming for his father, and Mr. and Mrs. Potter find it almost impossible to console him. He finally falls back to sleep some hours later, with them curled around him in his small bed, his fingers twisted in their clothes, tears still on his face.

When he wakes in the morning, Mrs. Potter is still there with him and he slips out of bed to find his father. Mr. Potter is in the kitchen, cooking breakfast, and James in content to sit and watch him. Soon, Mr. Potter will be going away to work at the Ministry and Mrs. Potter, too, to her shop in Diagon Alley and James will go with her, sit in the back of the bookstore and read quietly there until it is time to return home.

The routine is simple, comforting. He feels safe in their love.

Mr. Potter turns and sees him. “Hullo, James. We had a rough night so I figured we’d make this morning special and have pancakes!”

He smiles widely at James, who grins back, and Mrs. Potter emerges from James’s bedroom to join him at the table. She says, drawing a hand through his fringe, “Hello, lovey.”

James ducks away from her, just slightly, in jest. “Dad’s making pancakes!”

“Special pancakes,” adds Mr. Potter. “For the rough night.”

Mrs. Potter gives him her fondest smile. “Yes, special pancakes will banish the nightmares.”

They are wrong. James dreams of falling once a month from then on. They make James pancakes after every nightmare, until he is eleven, when the joy of his going to Hogwarts suddenly transforms them into a weekly occurrence and James has learned how to not cry out in his sleep.

*

“Will I make friends?” asks James, climbing into the train and watching his father hoist his trunk in for him.

“Of course, James,” says Mr. Potter. “Don’t be silly. Now, take hold of your trunk and effect your bravest face for your mother.”

James does, adding a little pose, but Mrs. Potter’s weeping continues. He stops and James looks to Mr. Potter, nose wrinkled. “Is she ever going to stop?”

Mr. Potter sighs, looking over his shoulder. “Give her a few days and try to owl on the regular and she will be just spiffy.” He sighs again. “Women, James. Never marry.”

“Okay,” says James, who thought girls were weird and had no immediate plans for such things anyway.

“All right, there’s a good one,” says his father. He reaches in and ruffles James’s hair. “Now be a lad, bugger off and stuff your brains, yeah?”

“Yeah,” says James. Mr. Potter salutes and James responds in like kind before dragging his trunk away to find an empty compartment. He does not, but there is one with just one boy, all ready fast asleep. James tries to be as quiet as he can as he goes about putting his trunk away: the boy is pale and far skinnier than anyone James has ever seen at his age.

The train starts off and James settles into his seat, crossing his legs beneath himself and watching the scenery. About an hour passes and James is getting bored of hills and sheep and thinking about going walkabout when the pale boy wakes with a start.

His eyes frantically search the room and land on James, who waves and asks in his most sympathetic voice, “Bad dream?”

The boy shakes his head and James wants to tell him that he needn’t bother with lying, James is a particularly accomplished liar, especially where dreams are involved, but James decides that he should keep his mouth shut at this juncture.

At least, that’s what Mrs. Potter is always telling him, particularly at fancy Ministry dinner parties. “It would be wise to keep your mouth shut at this juncture.” So he’s gotten rather good at that too.

“I’m James,” he says eventually. “I’m going to be in Gryffindor, because that’s where all Potters go. You?”

“I’m Remus,” says the pale boy. “I’ll probably be in Ravenclaw.”

James nods sagely. “You like books, I can tell.”

Remus shrugs. James rifles through his pockets and emerges victorious. “Want a chocolate biscuit? My mum went crackers before I left so I’ve got loads.”

“Thank you,” says Remus. “My gran did the same with sweaters.”

It is, James reflects, the start of a beautiful friendship.

*

The first night in the first year Gryffindor boy’s dorm is rather like the first night of peace accords after a particularly nasty war, with Black glaring at everyone and James not quite keeping his voice down about how he feels about Black being there and Remus tries to calm everyone and Peter is hiding. But when James has the dream of falling, it is Black who shakes him awake.

The boy says, “You kept shouting Thor,” almost curiously, and James replies, “I do that sometimes.”

Remus appears from nowhere and asks, “Do you have the dream a lot?”

“I thought you were asleep,” says Black.

The pale boy grins. “I do that sometimes.”

It startles a shaky laugh out of James and the trio spend the rest of the night in James’s bed, awake and talking about appearing out of no where and the tricks they want to learn and how Black once set his little brother’s robes on fire.

*

James and Black continue to publicly hate each other, as tradition dictated, but in the privacy of their tower, the four boys there are becoming fast friends. They quietly pull pranks on other students, especially the boys in the first year of Slytherin, because they were frequently very mean to Black. And while James knows he sometimes is too, Black is an honorable sort of kid and he doesn’t deserve getting hexed—even if he could hex back with the best of them—just because some tarted up old hat shouted a unexpected few words.

James figures he is an honorable sort of kid himself for having these feelings and really, that ought to make up for all the points he lost for the House last week with the singing pies. Even Dumbledore was laughing at that one.

*

As the months pass, James begins to notice that Remus sometimes would disappear for a few days and then reappear, looking even thinner and bruised and once he had a broken arm. James grows suspicious.

After James returns from the winter holidays, he discovers Black in the dorm, Peter hovering nearby. Black is tugging at the curtains and demanding to know why Remus came back from the holiday with a broken nose. When he sees James, he glares and hisses at Remus’s curtains, “This isn’t over.”

Then, Black marches over to him, takes his arm, and drags him out the door. Peter trots quickly after them.

“He  _broke his nose_  by tripping on the stairs,” says Black in a tone that clearly conveys what he feels the validity of that statement is.

James blurts out, “I think his dad beats him.”

Black’s eyes widen. “I never even thought of that.”

“I’m going to throw up,” says Peter.

Nearly eight months of frantic planning and increasingly harebrained schemes go by, with James continually asking Remus to come stay with him during the summer and Remus agreeing for a few weeks at a time, before disappearing home and returning with fading bruises, before one Saturday in September when James wakes from the falling dream to a the full moon in his window and thinks,  _Oh_.

He wakes up Peter and Sirius and tells them, “I know what’s wrong with Remus.”

When they confront him, Remus looks like he might burst into tears as Peter stares and Sirius keeps grinning and saying how cool it is. Remus shakes his head and mutters things about monsters and James grabs Remus gently by the shoulders, telling him fiercely, “I would never hate you for something you can’t help being.”

Remus does burst into tears then, and James holds him in his arms. Sirius wraps them both up and Peter rests his hands on Remus’s shoulders.

James decides that they will help Remus however they can. No one deserves to feel this alone.

*

To James, Lily Evans is the falling dream in human form. She makes his hands clammy and his breath shorten when she is near. Her braided red hair always catches in the corners of his vision, like fire, and her green eyes are like gems. James thinks it’s all very unbecoming, how he becomes weak when she is near, but he has no control.

She thinks he’s a troll, he knows, and that she actually likes hanging out with that Slytherin, Snape, and it makes him all the more desperate to have her attention. To have her eyes on him and him alone.

It takes Remus twelve minutes flat to figure out what James has become even more interested in property damage; and while it takes Sirius much longer, he enjoys it all the same. 

 *

And so James grows up, with his friends at his side, causing mischief and accidental heroics, and chasing Evans with a sort of level madness.

The dreams don’t stop. He had hoped as he grew—but they just get ever stronger.

*

It all changes when Sirius, with his pride and his wickedness, sends Snape down the Willow’s path.

“He wanted to know where Remus goes,” says Sirius, shrugging. “This will make him keeps his crooked nose out of other people’s business.”

At sixteen, James is not what you would call a good young man. He is brash and loud and entitled and well loved. He is the best at nearly everything he tries his hand at—Quidditch, transfiguration, dueling, runes, to name a few—and he likes to practice hexes on the unsuspecting. He knows that he is feared for that, as well as beloved, and that his charm speaks volumes. Evans hates him, which makes him love her all the more and behave even more badly. Remus is the good boy, James knows, and while Mr. and Mrs. Potter would like to see James as a Prefect, it will never happen as James has what McGonagall calls a “healthy disrespect for authority.”

But all the same, when Sirius speaks—James goes pale and sprints from the tower as fast as he legs will carry him. He becomes Prongs once out on the grounds, to eat up the distance faster, and he prays as he regains shape near the base that he will make it in time.

He grabs Snape around the waist just as he begins to pry the door up and one of Remus’s long limbs comes striking out. James slams the door shut and Snape begins to scream, and continues to scream long after James has removed him from the tunnel and deposited him out on the grounds.

Dumbledore finds them as Snape screams of monsters and James is feeling a mounting panic and fear he only gets when Lily is near and when he lies in his bed, suddenly awake in the night and gasping for breath.

The Headmaster stares them both down and before James knows it, they are in his office and Sirius is there. They three sit quietly all night, until the morning, when Remus is brought in. Dumbledore says, quietly, “I am so disappointed in you all.”

  1. He knows that Dumbledore keeps saying words like “expulsion” and “consequences”. But James just feels like he is falling, flying, tumbling into the dark.



When Snape is dismissed and Sirius sent to begin his penance in detention, James gets up to go, thinking that Dumbledore would want to speak to Remus. But the pale boy grasps James’s wrist and Dumbledore says, “You showed true bravery, James.”

He nods hollowly and gently extracts his wrist from Remus’s grasp. He whispers to his friend, “I’ll be waiting for you,” and he leaves.

When James gets into the hallway, he pulls his cloak from his pocket and covers himself. He sinks to the ground and quietly begins to weep.

*

Remus doesn’t speak to Sirius. Neither does James, really, not at first. What he wants to do is yell at Sirius for being an idiot, for being a terrible friend, for being  _such an arsehole_ , but he is so ashamed of them all he cannot bring his mouth to form the words. He quits ruffling at his hair and knows that he is being even more brilliant in class, and that people have begun to whisper that his head has become even more inflated with rumours of becoming Head Boy.

Beyond this, he and Remus sequester themselves in the tower and read, but when Sirius asks James something, he answers and eventually they begin talking. They have long conversations in James’s bed at night, about why Sirius did it and why James feels Sirius must earn his trust back, though it does take shorter than James anticipated. He cannot stay mad.

It takes Remus months, but eventually he smiles at Sirius again and, to James, it is like watching the sunrise in his best mate’s face.

Peter stands and watches it all happen, his eyes huge and blinking.

*

He sees Lily Evans one day, right after it happens, slap Snape hard across his face.

James smirks, ruffling his hair, and she sees it. She marches over to him too and then promptly gets him across the mouth as well. But, after, she hugs him and whispers in his ear, “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me Remus is  _all right_.”

He can’t say a damn word and eventually she lets go and leaves him.

Later, in the common room, he catches Evans hugging Remus and crying. Eventually, they begin to laugh.

Sirius watches from behind a book. “What’s that about?”

James is grinning. He’s going to marry that girl.

*

Sometimes, after James wakes up from the dream, he gets this overwhelming sense of something like loss and regret. He can’t quite put his finger on exactly what it is, or just what mixture of emotions he feels when his hand slips from someone’s grip, but he now he always feels better when he finds Sirius or Remus or Peter and they begin to plot something, or when he asserts his brilliance over his lesser peers, like Snape, who hates them all the more now, or when he looks at Lily and she catches him and makes a face, like always, but the disgust that used to be behind it is fading.

*

Mr. and Mrs. Potter die when they are seventeen. James sits ashen faced in the common room, where he had returned after McGonagall had gently broken the news to him in her office. Neither Sirius nor Peter has ever known anyone who died and they sit across from him, hands folded and eyes downturned. Remus, however, had lost his mum at nine and has gotten the House Elves to bring him a tea trolley and biscuits. He is murmuring soothing things when Lily Evans appears through the portrait and marches up to James, holding a bottle of Firewhiskey. She sits down next to him and pours a bit into his tea.

“It will help you fall asleep,” she says and Remus nods on his other side.

“Where did you get it?” asks James vaguely.

“Nowhere,” says Evans, “anywhere.”

“Why?” asks James.

Evans looks like she wants to slap him. Remus says quietly in his ear, “Lily’s aunt died when she was young.”

“Cancer,” Evans tells him.

“There was a fire,” says James.

“I know,” says Evans.

*

That night, James wakes from the falling dream screaming for the first time since he was eight.

*

Evans—Lily—and Remus take care of him for the next month.

James wants to tell them to leave him be, he’s fine, no matter now that he’s an orphan. They will know more and more people who will die in the coming months, he’s not that important. But they hold fast to his side, and Sirius and Peter too.

They make him laugh again, with Lily even helping Sirius out with pranks. They turn the hair of all the fourth year Ravenclaws blue and loose a hundred House points, but they say it’s worth it for his smile.

The Marauders show Lily their alternate forms and she claps with glee and says she wants one too.

“You’re an honorary Marauder now,” says Sirius, very seriously indeed as they lie by the lake one early spring day, “you probably should.”

“Shall I be the brains of the operation then?” she asks.

“Sorry,” says James, “but that’s Remus.”

Remus blushes and says, “But I need all the help I can get with this lot.”

Sirius leaps onto him with a mock growl and Peter, curled up sleeping as Wormtail, squeaks when they get too close and scurries away. James kicks out at them and rolls closer to Lily.

In the commotion, she catches his hand in hers. He looks at it, smiles, looks at her.

She is staring ahead at the fight and admonishing Remus and Sirius, but the corners of her mouth reach upwards ever so slightly as she does it.

*

Outside their walls, there is a war brewing and has been for some time.

Inside their walls, clear allegiances are being drawn, house-wise, and James watches it with dread though he knows where he and his friends lie.

Now, James has the dream every other night.

*

On graduation day, after Dumbledore delivers a somber and heartfelt speech about growing up and the choices we must all make, the Marauders and Lily head to Hogsmead for a final drink. While Sirius, Remus, and Peter are off fetching drinks, Lily leans into James.

“What do you think will happen now?” she asks, threading her fingers with his.

“I wanted to play Quidditch as a boy,” James says, almost philosophically. “I’ve all ready got offers from Puddlemere and the Falcons, but, I think—you know, I was reading one of your Muggle articles the other day.”

“James,” she says, “don’t try to distract me.”

“I’m not!” he protests. “I’m saying, it was about America and how they’d been fighting this ridiculous war and all the young men were dying and leaving their sweethearts behind, and there were these hippos—”

“Hippies,” says Lily.

He waves a hand. “Whatever. And there were these hippies that fled to Canada to avoid the war and I think, I’d flee. I’d flee with you if it meant that we’d be safe. But I want to be a Chaser for the Falcons and I don’t think I could live with myself if I went off and hid you somewhere and watched boys I went to school with—I can’t be that person, not with you. I want to be—”

“James?” she asks. “What are you saying?”

He is thinking of falling.

James tells her, “People want to hurt you, and your family, simply because you’re not what some people want you to be. And I think you are perfect as you are, and if anyone tried to take you away from me, I would crush them, even if you asked me not too. Because I gave my heart to you when I was twelve, Lily, and I would never dream of asking for it back.”

Lily smiles radiantly at him.

*

They are married shortly after. No one is surprised. As James overhears Remus saying to Sirius, “They’ve basically been dating since we were fourteen.”

“Yeah,” Sirius agrees. “Never really did matter if it was stalking or not.”

*

And the war, the war:

Sirius watches his brother finally chose his side. They all join the Order. James does not become a Chaser, and instead uses his parents’ vast fortune to support Lily and himself (and Remus, who always blushes and frowns when James presents him with gold but James could care less about that twat wanting to suffer bravely through genteel poverty). Remus begins to disappear for days at a time and Sirius looks like he is growing ever madder and Peter has become quiet and steadfast. They defy death numerous times and save the lives of others.

James confronts Voldemort himself one night in December of 1979. He’s not quite sure how it happens, but he knows he becomes separated from the Order group he had been amongst. They are at a Death Eater meeting and a fight breaks out, as always, and suddenly there he is. 

He knows he should be afraid but he instinct kicks in and James raises his wand. They fight, long and hard and James uses all the little dirty tricks he mastered in and out of class to survive.

Finally, he is grabbed round the waist by someone and Apparated away.

James is still fighting when they land and Peter, who grabbed him, calms him down. James realizes they are in the living room of his house and Lily is nowhere to be seen.

Peter fetches him a glass of water and James calls to his friend, “Lily must never know about tonight.”

“Of course,” nods Peter and hands James the glass.

And the war goes on.

They lose battles. They lose friends. The Prewett twins are never found, nor is much of Benjy Fenwick found besides bits. The Bones family is slaughtered.Remus seems quieter and Sirius is suspicious of him. Lily threatens to slap Sirius round the head, but the void between Remus and Sirius grows every greater. James and Peter are forced to watch.




 

Their lives are dissolving.

James dreams of falling every time he closes he eyes.

Then, one night in February, Lily whispers to him in the dark, “I’m pregnant. Oh, God, James, I’m pregnant. What will we do?”

James holds her tight.

She asks, “I want him. But is it right that we bring a child into this world?”

He says, “We will protect him with everything we have.”

*

That night, James tells Lily of his duel that one December. Lily looks fiercely on and says, “We’ll defy him more yet.”

*

And then Sybill Trelawney opens her big mouth.

And they hide.

*

James once told Lily that he gave her his heart at twelve and now that his son is born, he tells Harry that he loves him as big as they sky and he loves him past forever and longer than always. He tells him, “I promised your mother I would protect you with everything I have, and so I shall.”

They hide away in a new house, that no one but their Secret Keeper has been to, and they keep safe.

But it is not enough and, one night, it happens. They are putting Harry to bed and suddenly James finds himself stalling at the bottom of the stairs. They have wards all about the house and James’s flesh is crawling because he suddenly can’t feel them. And then the door rattles in its frame and crashes to the ground he  _knows_.

“What?” cries Lily.

He is sprinting away from the stairs, going for his wand and throwing a curse, and he shouts, “Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! I’ll try to hold him off—just go!”

James feels a growing terror and fury inside him, like an oncoming storm.

Voldemort stands before him suddenly, his wand raised, and the last thing James hears is laughter.

*

 James is falling—  
  
  
  



	2. part two

He opens his eyes to a smoke filled sky.

And then there is Dumbledore, standing over him. James—no, that’s not right, there’s someone else here, someone older, and Loki comes into reality with a gasp and a strangled cry. His entire body is vibrating and he can feel the remnants of some huge power coming out of him, and he knows, he knows, that what he was prior to his fall is the only reason he is now alive.

From the corners of his eyes, he sees the ruins all around him and Loki asks, “Lily?”

Dumbledore looks sadly at him and Loki curls into himself, beginning to weep.

*

After, when Dumbledore bundles Loki into his arms and Apparates them away to his office, Loki sits stoically on the sofa. He calmly tells Dumbledore of Asgard and the jotunn and Thor and Midgard and his hatred. He tells him of falling and tumbling through the roots of the World Tree. Loki does not pause to let Dumbledore speak, even when the old man looks like he might open his mouth, and Loki posits that he fell into the womb of Mrs. Potter and was born again as James.

“The rest,” says Loki, “is as you know.”

“I’ve always suspected,” says Dumbledore. Loki stares blankly and the old wizard continues, “You’ve always been too clever by half, you know, and it is a simple matter to look into you with magic, Loki.”

He wants to say, James. I’m James Potter and my wife is dead and where, where is my son, old man?

But that’s what James would do. And Loki—

“I can never see him again,” states Loki.

“Hmm?” asks Dumbledore.

His mouth goes severe. “My son, Dumbledore, my son. I can never see him and they can never know. Let them think James Potter dead. Sirius will raise him quite well. And I will fade away.”

“But Sirius was your Secret Keeper,” the old man says.

“Peter,” Loki hears himself say. He begins, quietly, to weep anew. “It had always been Peter.”

*

The beginning of November is the shape of things to come.

Before Sirius can do anything rash, like Loki knows he would, Dumbledore sends Aurors after Peter, who is arrested and imprisoned. Little Harry is sent to live with Sirius in his tiny flat and Dumbledore sends Remus to look after both of them. Death Eaters are rounded up across the country, including a trio who had tried to attack and murder the Longbottoms, believing that their Lord is still alive.

A funeral is held for James and Lily Potter: a quiet, somber affair, with little crying and jubilation hidden in the eyes of most. Dumbledore tells Loki that Remus was the only one who cried at all, and little Harry, and that Sirius stood there with Harry in one arm and Remus wrapped in the other, his face set and proud and dark circles under his eyes.

Dumbledore tells Loki mostly everything that is happening, for he refuses to even acknowledge the papers that find their way to the coffee table of Dumbledore’s private quarters.

Loki sleeps there, even though he could roam the halls undetected quite easily. The children of the school had been sent on impromptu holiday to be with their families as the community mourned and celebrated the end of war. Nor was it not common knowledge to Dumbledore that Loki knew intimately the ins and outs of the school all ready, and that the old wizard had found Loki’s cloak.

I used to be able to be invisible at will, he thought and then let it pass.

He spends a lot of time in Dumbledore’s quarters, as Dumbledore goes out to deal with remnants of the end, and he finds that his mind drifts towards his family and friends. He wonders how he had never seen certain things until too late, like Remus and Sirius breaking apart through Peter’s whispers, or how Peter, sweet, stupid Peter, had become what he was. He thinks of Lily and their son, who will never know his parents except through stories. He thinks of his parents, the Potters, and his other parents and his brother. Did they mourn him as fiercely as Sirius and Remus and an entire world mourned James? Or was the memory of him swept aside in favor of his failures, like Peter?

He thinks of the bridge home and there is Harry

Harry

Harry

Lily

*

Outside, it has inexplicably begun to snow.

*

Loki finds he doesn’t hate Peter. He will have what is meant for him, after all, as Loki once had. Jealousy merely reaps what it sows. Loki misses the boy he once knew.

*

Dumbledore finds him standing in the snow on the day before the children come back.

“I cannot feel Asgard,” Loki says. “I cannot find my way home.”

“I feared,” begins Dumbledore.

Loki turns his head. “The more you say, the more I believe you have always known what would come to pass. Please, let me be, before I am forced to do something James would regret.”

“That was never my intention,” he says. “I simply meant that the magic used to revive you—I fear it was the last of your gifts as an Asgardian, and now you are but a human wizard. I would hope, Loki, that you will remember being happy and well-loved here, in this school, and that you will wish to stay with us.”

Snow begins to fall. Loki can feel it stay frozen on his skin for the barest of seconds before it melts and he would be lying if he said that the chill doesn’t linger with him. Before, it hadn’t, but now—

The old wizard is right.

Loki closes his eyes to the snow and asks, “Where else would I go?”

And so Dumbledore hides him in his school. He covers him in glamours and calls him Ragnar Lopt to the staff, like he believes it funny, and Loki recognizes himself but barely. His eyes are green, his hair curly and blond, but there is something passing same in his face. Loki supposes the sorrow has bled through and that is all he can see when he looks into his own eyes.

His heart is the same, he thinks. It beats a constant tattoo: Lily, Lily, Lily, Lily.

He thinks it should skip beats, add Harry, Sirius, Remus, Peter, Thor.

Loki bottles it away and walks through the halls as a new hire, a Runes professor to assist old Babbling, who has been thinking about retiring lately, Dumbledore, really, this war has taken so much out of me, I should like to go see the sea, and this new boy Ragnar is quite bright. You’d do well with him.

Dumbledore smiles, as if this has always been the plan for when the war is won.

*

When the students return from their winter holidays, Ragnar Lopt has officially become their Runes professor. Most like him better than Babbling, who had an unfortunate habit of living up to her name, and Loki can hear them whispering in the halls about how clever and quick witted he is, and even Peeves leaves him alone, how weird is that?

Over the next year, he quickly ingratiates himself among the rest of the staff as well, in a way he hadn’t before. He had been only twenty-one, when he was hired and had celebrated his twenty-second with them; many had said he was too young to be teaching, but Dumbledore maintained that students loved him and that he was more than sufficiently clever at Runes.

Which was true, thinks Loki. He was in fact rather brilliant. After all, millennia ago, he had helped to invent them.

*

He thought that teaching Runes would remind him of his brother most, of his own misguided attempts at getting his brother to understand this beautiful code of magic he had written, of falling away from his hand.

But he hasn’t dreamt of falling in over a year now and Lily’s is the face that long nights of marking translations from students summons up.

Loki misses Thor, but he longs for Lily.

*

One day, at the end of term, a sixth year approaches him in the library and quietly asks whom he lost in the war. He answers, “My wife and son,” without thinking and everyone else besides is on his tongue too as he quickly excuses himself. He locks himself in his office and conjures himself a mirror. When he tries to smile, Loki looks exactly as sad as always.

*

He tells Dumbledore that he thinks he’d like a holiday this summer and Dumbledore grins.

Loki rents a cottage in Wales and relearns how to smile.

His grief is his alone. No one else should get to see it.

*

It has been six years. Loki has become a trickster again, terrorizing Filch and blaming it on Peeves. When Dumbledore calls him Loki, others laugh (though Dumbledore put fear into them all when once he asked, “What makes you think I’m joking?”). Loki feels almost like himself once more, all laughter and mischief, but he is lonely. He supposes he likes it that way.

It is then that Dumbledore, in his infinite wisdom, decides that hiring both Severus Snape and Remus Lupin in one fell swoop is a brilliant idea. When it is announced in a teachers’ meeting in June that Snape would teach Potions and Remus would be the new librarian, Loki finds himself shrinking away from the staff and the two new hires, wishing to disappear into the walls around him. He hears Remus answering questions about Harry’s wellbeing and Loki feels like dying. When he is introduced, he makes sure to shake their hands with indifference and nothing else.

He returns to his offices then, removing the picture he keeps of Lily and Harry in his locked desk drawer, and takes it to his quarters. He hides away the rest of the pictures of his family that he had scavenged after his death, locking them into a box and enchanting the box to be hidden even further. He puts it into the back of his closet and drops his cloak over it for good measure.

Loki sits back on his bed when he is done and thinks of Remus, which leads to thoughts of Sirius and Peter and Lily and Harry. He wonders if he unconsciously tried to find hints of his older brother in people: Sirius, after all, had his pride and Remus his loyalty. Loki figured he had even hid some of Thor away into James. Harry will probably be exactly like him.

He wonders if Thor misses him, as much as Loki, even amnesiac and reborn, does.

When he returns to the fold for dinner, Remus tries to engage him in conversation about Runes. Loki stays as distant as possible until Dumbledore swoops Remus away and he releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

*

Over the next school year, he catches Remus staring at him, and Snape too. Loki had hoped that the bad blood between Snape and Remus would have kept them away from him, forcing them to hermitage in the school to avoid each other; but Remus had always been annoyingly well-mannered and Snape was, well, Loki really had no clue.

“They know,” Loki hisses to Dumbledore one night after he has broken into his office.

“I hate that you figured out how to do that at fifteen,” says the old wizard, shaking his head fondly.

“I hate that you hired one of my best friends and my nemesis,” Loki snaps back, “both of whom think I’m dead!”

“James is dead,” says Dumbledore.

“Don’t!” shouts Loki.

After a moment, Loki sinks into a chair, covering his face with his hands.

Dumbledore says quietly, “I’m sorry. And, no, they don’t know. You just—remind them of someone. Remus quite likes you, coincidentally, but thinks you hate him.”

“He’s always talking of Harry and Sirius. It’s easier to make him think I hate him,” says Loki.

“I suppose it must be,” says Dumbledore and then offers him a sweet.

*

Loki had always tried to think of Harry as dead too, so that he would be with his mother and not simply out of his reach.

*

When the Weasley twins arrive at the school the next year, Remus’s eyes are turned from Loki and onto the boys that remind them both so much of their past. Loki takes it upon himself to become their patron saint of sorts, mainly because with them harassing Filch, he needn’t—it had nothing to do with his memories of four boys, or his memory of two brothers, bent over in mischief, or of what his son could someday be. During their second year, he even slips the Map into the bag of Fred on afternoon as he walks whistling past.

He sees the boys bent over it in the library later that night, and Remus shelving books nearby, failing to hide his grins. He must think that the twins stumbled across it in their dorms—behind the rocks that James had hidden it in on their last nights there.

“Someone good will find it,” he had said.

Sirius, Remus, and Peter had nodded.

James had added, “Someone who is very good at being very bad.”

They probably didn’t expect one of them to come back and get it, looking for remnants of a past he no longer had access to.

*

It is the beginning of August, in 1991, and Loki has just come off an extremely impressive weeklong bender in Hogsmead. (Curiously, to Dumbledore at least, Loki never drinks in November. Loki doesn’t tell him, but the crying leaves him drained enough without adding Firewhiskey to the mix.)

Dumbledore finds him in his office, ensconced behind his desk as he begins works on lesson plans for the upcoming year. He has charmed away most of the hangover but favors his head with an ice pack to his temples and he has just finished put together a small packet of sweets to give to Dumbledore to surreptitiously send to Harry for his birthday.

He always does, giving the boy something of everything at Honeydukes, but he had overheard Remus talking about Harry’s fascination with Chocolate Frogs at the end of last term, and so there are more Chocolate Frogs than usual.

Loki feels chocolate to be a poor substitute to broomstick lessons on his very first broom with his father, a once proud Chaser, or lessons at photography on one of his mother’s Muggle cameras, or a vast array of millions of other things he has to offer his son—but he feels they might be forward coming from Dumbledore, even if his father was behind them, because his father was dead.

“Yes?” says Loki.

“I’ve come to talk to you about the upcoming year,” says the Headmaster.

“As you can see,” he says, slowly, “I’m all ready hard at work on my lesson plans, which I know cannot be said for most of my colleagues—”

“Do you know what year it is?” asks Dumbledore, cutting him off.

Loki blinks. “I know you’re getting up there in age, but.”

The old man says bluntly, “Harry has received his letter.”

Loki blinks again. “Oh. I—forgot.”

Dumbledore looks at him with sadness, but Dumbledore always looks at him that way; Loki has gotten used to it.

But, in that moment, he realizes, for all his planning and keeping himself secret and safe and James Potter dead in the memories of others—he realizes it never once occurred to him that someday Harry would grow up and come to Hogwarts.

After a moment, Loki asks, “Is he like me?”

“He turned Sirius’s fur red the other day,” says Dumbledore. “So, yes, he’s probably exactly like you.”

“I meant,” he begins.

“I know,” the old man says. “Sirius says, mischief aside, he is a properly normal young wizard boy.”

“I had just worried that parts of what I was might have carried over,” says Loki quietly. “I suppose because I had been mostly human then...”

“Of course,” says Dumbledore.

*

The first time he sees Harry since the night he died, the boy is eleven and in the crowd of first years in the Great Hall and it is like his heart has stopped. He can feel, under the table, someone grasp his knee and, when Loki looks over, it is Snape.

Trust the bugger, he thinks, to figure it out.

He has spent years wanting to hate Snape, just hate him with the fury that he once reserved only for Odin and Thor, but Loki has also spent years now feeling nothing at all.

Nothing at all, except a loss so vast it is a sea inside him.

And so he merely moves his knee away.

Loki stares at the wall, his plate, his hands for the rest of the night. He never once looks away, not even when the Gryffindor table erupts into shouts of glee when Harry joins them or when Remus Lupin shouts and claps and Harry looks to him.

Loki attacks his dinner, when it comes, with extreme prejudice.

When he finally manages to affect his escape, he flees under his cloak to his quarters, thankful that he had the foresight to stash it away on his person before the Sorting Ceremony. The tears in his eyes were a clear giveaway of some sort of grief and he has no intention of telling anyone what is wrong. The rumor that he had lost his wife in the war still floats quietly amongst students who took his class and he has no intention of starting it anew.

He throws himself on his bed like he is a child again and clutches at his invisibility cloak, fingers gripping tightly. He has nearly regained control over his breathing when a knock comes at his door.

“Go away,” shouts Loki into his mattress. The knocking continues. Loki screams, “Albus, you buggering old bat, go away!”

“It’s not Albus, dear,” says Minerva from the other side of the wall.

Loki takes his hands down. “I suppose you may enter.”

“Thank you,” she says, and does.

He sits up on his bed and Minerva come and sits next to him.

After a very long while, she says, “This must be very hard for you.”

“What?” he asks blankly.

“Don’t play dumb,” she says. “You were one of my favorite students for a reason, James.”

He closes his eyes. “You know, I really do prefer—Loki. And I suppose you’ve known all along.”

“Only for a year,” she shrugs. He marvels. He never knew she was even capable of a shrug. She continues, “That you might be descended from a god was a joke that circulated since you arrived. But the fate of James Potter became his most closely guarded secret. Sometimes I saw you half in shadow, in the corner of my eye, and thought, Oh. But it was nothing more than a passing strange fancy, until last May, when Albus sat me down and told me of that short Halloween.”

Loki barks out a laugh and Minerva stares intently at him.

“You poor boy,” she says.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he replies quietly. “My wife is dead. My son thinks I’m dead, as do my best friends, one of whom works here and believes I hate him, and I betrayed my brother and killed myself. I have nothing, except for the sad little life I’ve made here.”

Minerva shrugs again and it is still just as weird. “If you hate it so—you’ve never once thought of leaving?”

“Where else would I go?” he asks her.

“Thor,” she states. “Your brother.”

Loki shakes his head. “I cannot get home.”

“If you could?” she presses.

“I do not know,” he admits. “I don’t know if I can bear a world where no part of her ever existed.”

“Oh, Loki,” Minerva says. “You know, I think of Lily. Frequently.”

“I think of Lily always,” he replies.

She makes a soft sound and wraps her arm about his shoulders. He thinks of Mrs. Potter and his childhood dreams of falling, and he leans into her embrace.

Minerva says, “Tell me about her. The Lily I knew and the Lily you knew were quite different I believe.”

“Not really. She hated me on sight. I believe I wanted her all the more for it,” he says. “She never let me get away with anything, always coming to you when Sirius and I had stepped out of line. You know she used to ask me if Remus’s father was abusing him? I used to think that too, and she never believed me when I said he wasn’t. I honestly think she was relieved when she found out he was a werewolf. Parents hurting their children—she couldn’t understand. And, oh, was she so clever, and she was kinder than I could ever be. She pushed me. She made me a better man. Some days now I think about that and I hate her. If I was a terrible man, she would have lived. Without me, but I could handle that, knowing that she was alive. I suppose Harry will be exactly like her. He looks too much like me to not—”

Minerva tightens her hold on him.

Loki looks at his hands. There are teardrops on them.

He says, “There are days when I cannot breathe for missing her.”

*

And now he wonders: would his grief be lessened if he just disappeared from the wizarding world and found a home somewhere that had never heard of James and Lily Potter, and their son Harry, and their war?

By now, Thor has fallen to Midgard—would it be easier if he went to America and found him and begged for forgiveness and passage home? Would Thor take him in his arms and call him brother? Could he ask the All-Father to bring her back to him? If he said aloud to the heavens, I understand and it breaks my heart and I just want to be home and she is my home so please, father, would it be made so?

He thinks of that girl, that sixth year that asked once, “Whom did you lose in the war?"

He doesn’t know if his family, for all their worth and honor, could understand that question and the pain of his every waking hours. 

And so Loki stays.


End file.
